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Virtual ISMIR 2020, Exit report

Posted on by finnupham

This last year, I served virtual technology chair for the 21st meeting of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval ISMIR 2020, a position deemed necessary when COVID-19 lockdowns began to spread. The transformation of a week-long in person conference to a week-long 24 hr virtual meeting required a whirlwind of effort from all the organisers, and to sum up the lessons learned, we have compiled an exit report (pdf). The document lays out what technologies were used, how events were scheduled, instructions shared with participants, and details from many individual chairs on how they adapted their responsibilities. Also included is an analysis of how attendees actually used the platforms, looking at attendance numbers per event time and type, and a report on participants experiences shared via a post-conference survey. 

The 40+ page report (pdf) may be of interest to anyone coordinating their first virtual academic conference and to researchers looking at how research communities are adapting to the current circumstances. To share a taste of what we learned, here are some highlights from the analysis of registration statistics, virtual platform usage, and the post-conference survey responses.

The virtual format allowed many more people to attend ISMIR than usual. In a conferences that normally sees 400 participants, we had over 800 sign up, with half of the registrants attending for the first time. In the report, we break down the distribution of registrants across a number of categories, below are the stats by country of residence, gender, and career position. The inset green wedges shows the proportion of first time attendees per category. Some of these ratios are to be expected, say the high proportion of grad students attending for the first time, others are more informative like the higher ratio of new women registrants than of new men.

With so many people registering, it was hard to know how many to expect in attendence at specific events. Attrition is very high for virtual events, particularly if registration is relatively low cost. Participation at any given conference event was split by our 24 hr doubled schedule, but careful review of the platform statistics found the vast majority of registrants visited the conference slack daily while ~50% commented and attended zoom events.

The 24 hr schedule was designed to ensure participants could have the full conference experience from any time zone represented in our registrants. The schedule was organised in two sets of shifts, spaced 11.5 hrs apart, with the Alpha-Gamma and Beta-Delta pairs offering the same poster sessions and main conference presentations such as keynotes. From the activity in slack channels, we found a significant difference in attendance levels for the poster sessions, with the first of both double sessions consistently more busy than the second. This difference in demand seems to be a mix of time zone concentrations and a kind of premier effect, and would be worth planning around in the future.

The post conference survey was answered by about 20% of attendees and they shared many useful comments about the experience. Top of mind was how this style of virtual conference compared to what the community was used to.  On many points, the loss of in-person contact was keenly felt, but some aspects of this Slack-supported virtual experience were preferred by a solid minority.

Besides noting the limitations of the conference design and platforms, it’s worth noting that some of the differences in experiences reported are a consequence the conditions from which people were participating. Most were at least somewhat more constrained by the practicalities for attending without leaving their work and home. But despite all that was new and challenging about this way of conferencing, we were very happy to see that most survey respondents were still at least somewhat satisfied by the experience provided.

Please see the report for more survey results and analysis of participation, details of how the conference was designed, what we might suggest doing differently, and full credit to the many people who made ISMIR 2020 a success.

ISMIR 2019 and Human-Centric MIR

Posted on by finnupham

I had the pleasure of attending ISMIR properly for the first time in its 20 years of bringing together music technology specialists. Through the main meeting and satellite events ran a theme of how these systems for interpreting, organising, and generating musical materials impact our musical cultures. Whether or not researchers are worried about the ethical dimensions of their work, these need considering.

This issues was a fixture of the first workshop on Designing Human-Centric MIR Systems, where I presented on a talk titled Human Subtracted: Social Distortion of Music Technology (slides, extended abstract).

The social functions of music have been broken by successive music technology advances, bringing us to the current “boundless surfeit of music” (Schoenberg) navigated with only the faintest traces of common interests retained in personalised music recommendation systems. This paper recounts the desocialisation of music through sound recording, private listening, and automated recommendation, and considers the consequences of music’s persistent cultural and interpersonal power through this changing use.

This workshop featured a number of contributions on the impacts and opportunities of recommendation systems for music, and I recommend anyone interested in this issue check out the proceedings.

MIR for good was also a project at this year’s WiMIR event, a sort of mini-hackathon designed to encourage greater engagement by women in the field with hands on projects, opportunities to find mentorships, and other activities. One group started a working document to discuss ethical guidelines for information research in music. (I played with Eurovision music with Ashley Burguyone and others. Check out Tom Collins’ interactive plots of songs past ordered by key audio features. Yes you can play the tunes!)

The next afternoon had a fantastic tutorial on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in MIR. The talks brought in issues learned from machine learning systems in other parts of life and discussed how these play out with music. We picked up scenarios where music information determines access, opportunity, financial compensation, and the interests of minority communities. It was a good time that raised many more questions than we could answer.

And during the conference proper, this question of ethics and good practice for MIR came up again in the keynote by Georgina Born called MIR redux: Knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures. The abstract:

How can MIR refresh itself and its endeavors, scholarly and real world? I speak as an outsider, and it is foolhardy to advise scientist colleagues whose methodologies one would be hard pressed to follow! Nonetheless, my question points in two directions: first, to two areas of auto-critique that have emerged within the MIR community – to do with the status of the knowledge produced, and ethical and social concerns. One theme that unites them is interdisciplinarity: how MIR would gain from closer dialogues with musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology, and science and technology studies in music. Second, the ‘refresh’ might address MIR’s pursuit of scientific research oriented to technological innovation, itself invariably tied to the drive for economic growth. The burgeoning criticisms of the FAANG corporations and attendant concerns about sustainable economies remind us of the urgent need for other values to guide science and engineering. We might ask: what would computational genre recognition or music recommendation look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise imaginative and cultural self- and/or group development, adhering not to a logic of ‘similarity’ but diversity, or explored the socio-musical potentials of music discovery, linked to goals of human flourishing (Nussbaum 2003, Hesmondhalgh 2013)? The time is ripe for intensive and sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously unseen. My keynote ends by inviting action: a think tank to take this forward.

Go watch it. It was really good!

Around all the other research topics at this conference, the question of how to do MIR well, to do this work without causing harm, was never far from my mind. And I expect it will continue to echo as we prepares to host the next ISMIR next year in Montreal.

Dissertation in Open on ProQuest

Posted on by finnupham

Finally, my PhD dissertation is posted in full on ProQuest, open access to all. It’s a bit of a behemoth at 64 MB and 441 pages, but if you want to know everything about involuntary respiratory phase alignment to music, this is the document for you.

The first half is a lot of technical details on how to get relevant timing information from respiratory sequence recordings. The second is a long analysis of when alignments arise and what that says about how our breathing is engaged by what we are listening to.

I feel lucky to have had the time to dig deep in the analysis. The patterns are investigated from the perspective of the individual musical works used as stimuli AND from the perspective of individual listeners in five case studies. And as associations arose between respiratory behaviour and musical events, the last section focuses on how these relate to known (or hypothesized) respiratory control mechanisms. By studying the details, this dissertation goes from detection of a little known phenomenon to testable hypotheses about causal mechanisms. I look forward to putting each of these to the test.

I’m really proud of this work. It brings together research from multiple fields and made use of all my formal training plus a lot I had to learn outside of the classroom. (Like everything about the respiratory system. That certainly wasn’t covered in math, or music theory, or psych classes…)

Full Abstract:

This dissertation explores the surprising phenomenon of listeners’ unconsciously breathing in time to music, inspiring and expiring at select moments of specific works. When and how the experience of hearing music might produce stimulus-synchronous respiratory events is studied through Repeated Response Case Studies, gathering participants’ respiratory sequences during repeated listenings to recorded music, and through Audience Response Experiments, responses for participants experiencing live music together in a concert hall.

Activity Analysis, a new statistical technique, supported the development and definition of discrete phase components of the breath cycle that come into coordination: the onsets of inspiration and expiration, the intervals of high flow during these two main phases, and the post-expiration pause. Alignment in these components across listenings illuminate when the naturalistic complex stimuli can attract or cue listener respiration events.

Four patterns of respiratory phase alignment are identified through detailed analysis of stimuli and responses. Participants inspired with the inspirations of vocalists and wind performers, suggesting embodied perception and imagined action may exert influence on their quiet breathing. Participants suppressed and delayed inspirations when the music was highly unpredictable, suggesting adaptation in aid of auditory attention. Similar behaviour occurred with sustained sounds of exceptional aesthetic value. Participants inspired with recurring motivic material and similar high salience events, as if marking them in recognition or amplifying their affective impact. And finally, participants occasionally breathed following structural endings, suggesting a sigh-like function of releasing the respiratory system from cortical control.

These instances of music-aligned respiratory phase alignment seemed to be stronger in participants who were typically active with heard music, but the impacts of training and expertise was not a simple condition for this behaviour. Contrasts between case study participants showed highly idiosyncratic patterns of respiratory alignment and differences in susceptibility along side moments of shared effect. In the audience experiments, alignment within phase components was measurable and significant, but rarely involved more than a quarter of participants in any given instance. These levels of concurrent activity in respiration underline the subtlety of this bodily response to music.

And if you want to know more than what you can find in the document, or borrow scripts/data that haven’t been posted yet, get in Touch!

ICMPC15 – Reliable Psychophysiological Changes to Music listening

Posted on by finnupham

A talk and a poster discussed a number psychophysiological responses to music, specifically events measurable over repeated listenings in skin conductance, respiration rate, heart rate, and zygomaticus and corrugator contractions. The talk explains how Activity Analysis can be applied to these responses in order to identify reliable reactions to musical stimuli, and the poster shares some of the consistencies and inconsistencies we can find in different listeners’ responses through these signals.

Demo: Activity Analysis on Psychophysiological Measures of Responses to Music

Download the slides (pdf)

Abstract

Continuous measurements of responses are particularly useful for music cognition as our experience develops during the presentation of this powerful stimulus. And yet, responses can vary substantially, and psychophysiological measurements are particularly noisy. Multiple studies have identified changes in psychophysiological states with the presentation of music, but identifying when changes are triggered is not a simple task, even with rapid changing signals like skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration.

Activity Analysis is a new analysis paradigm developed specifically for music research that focuses on response events and their co-occurrence across multiple listenings to the same stimulus, whether by different listeners to a live performance or repeated listenings by a single participant to recorded music. This approach accommodates the extraneous information in continuous measurements of response and leads to new results from these complex signals, including statistical assessment of coherence between responses at specific moments in music. It supports response-led exploration of the stimuli as well as addressing questions of whether and how individual pieces are coordinating the experiences of listeners.

Aims

To demonstrate the application of Activity Analysis with the MatLab toolbox on collections of psychophysiological responses from repeated response experiments.

Main Content

This demo will introduce Activity Analysis, demonstrate the visualisation capabilities of this approach to continuous responses, and apply tests of coordination to skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration belt measurements from audience response collections and repeated response collections. Particular attention will be paid to the local coordination test, which identifies when responses are in significant alignment with the music. All to be discussed is the process of determining appropriate parameters for coordination testing of response events such as orienting responses in skin conductance, along with the implications of a lack of measurable coordination in response activity.

Implications for practice

Activity Analysis may be very useful for the study of responses to music, allowing researchers to pin point when changes in responses occur and whether the timing of changes might be expected to replicate. With the MatLab toolbox, these techniques can be readily applied to existing data sets as well as future experiments.

Value for this conference

Activity Analysis can be applied to a number experiments reported at ICMPC and conducted in labs associated with many related organizations. The relationship between music and listeners bodily responses is a long-standing but still growing area of research and tools for the exploration of experimental data are needed along side methods for testing specific hypotheses.

References

Upham, F., & McAdams, S. (2018). Activity analysis and coordination in continuous responses to music.Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 35(3), 253-294.

Upham, F. (2016) ActivityAnalysisToolbox_2.0. GitHub repository, https://github.com/finn42/ActivityAnalysisToolbox_2.0

Felt It My Way: Idiosyncratic Psychophysiological Responses to Recorded Music

Download the poster (pdf)

Abstract

Psychophysiological responses to music have been studied from decades, but the focus has typically been on common response patterns across listeners. The Repeated Response paradigm, recording a participant’s responses to a set playlist of stimuli over multiple listenings, allows for more in depth considerations of responses typical of individual listeners. Repeated exposures to the same stimuli have been associated with desensitization (Grewe, Nagel, Kopiez, & Altenmüller, 2007) as well as sensitization in increased coordination (Sato, Ohsuga, & Moriya, 2012). Either way, there is an opportunity to capture consistencies tied to individual participants musical histories and inclinations that can easily be lost when looking for agreement across a population or audience.

Aims

Identify consistency and coordination in individual participants psychophysiological responses to music and consider the contrasts between participants’ responses to pieces of music.

Method

Five participants heard the same six pieces of music 12 times over several weeks. During these listenings, skin conductance, finger temperature, heart rate, respiration, and facial muscle sEMG (Zygomaticus, Corrugator) were recorded continuously. Using activity analysis, we evaluated first which responses showed significantly coordinated in music relevant response events per participant. When participants showed coordination, their moments of consistency were compared to see whether they aligned or contrasted.

Results

Preliminary results show that participants vary how well their responses are coordinated between listenings and which response measures show the most coordination. For example, two participants showed very high respiratory coordination but different patterns of consistency in finger temperature decreases. Besides the overall pattern of disagreement, specific results will be shared on responses to specific works, including a late Beethoven String Quartet excerpt and a Dubstep track.

Conclusions

Listeners can show some shared patterns of behaviour to music, but they also develop idiosyncratic response sequences to pieces they come to know. This is not only measurable in post-stimulus ratings and preference but also in the sensitivity, reliability, and timing of changes in their psychophysiological responses.

References

Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R., Altenmüller, E. (2007). Listening to music as a re-creative process: Physiological, psychological, and psychoacoustical correlates of chills and strong emotions. Music Perception, 24(3), 297-314.

Sato, T. G., Ohsuga, M., and Moriya, T. (2012). Increase in the timing coincidence of a respiration event induced by listening repeatedly to the same music track. Acoustical Science and Technology, 33(4):255–261.

ICMPC15 – The Audience’s Breath

Posted on by finnupham

This year’s ICMPC recorded all of the talks in support of virtual attendance. Here is my long talk (20 min + Q&A) on coordination in respiration between audience members.

The Audience’s Breath: Collective Respiratory Coordination in Response to Music

F. Upham, H. Egermann, and S. McAdams

Abstract

Performers have used respiratory metaphors to describe the reactions of the audience’s engagement with a performance. We refer to an audience holding their collective breath, or sighing with a release of tension. Significant regularities in respiratory phase have been measured in participants’ responses over multiple listenings to some recorded music (Sato, Ohsuga, & Moriya, 2012), but this fleeting alignment has not yet been measured in audiences at live concerts.

Aims

With recordings of respiration from audience members at live performances, we aim to evaluate whether there is measurable respiratory alignment between them to some or all pieces. If there is coordination, we consider which phase of the respiratory cycle shows the highest degree of alignment and how this could relate to audience members’ experience of the music performed.

Method

Respiration data from two audiences were evaluated using new techniques in respiratory phase detection and measurement of coordination. From the first audience, 40 participants sat amongst a larger group in an experiment-led concert of chamber music including three pieces of contrasting genres. The second audience was composed of 48 participants who were presented solo flute music, some recorded and some played live. Half of this group continuously reported the unexpectedness of the music while the remaining half reported their felt emotional responses through handheld devices.

Five components of the respiratory phase were evaluated for coordination using activity analysis with parameters tuned to each: Inspiration Onset, High Inspiration Flow interval, Expiration Onset, High Expiration Flow interval, and Post-Expiration Pause. These phases relate to the mechanics of respiration and the sensory consequences of air exchange.

Results

Significant coordination in respiratory phase components were observed between audience members to most stimuli, but the most coordinated phases varied from piece to piece. High Inspiratory and Expiration Flow intervals were most often significantly coordinated, compared to onsets. Post Expiratory Pauses, which would count instances of breath holding, were only coordinated in one piece. Less than half of participants engage in phase alignment concurrently, however numerous instances relate well to developing theories of respiration/cognition interactions, including differences in the alignment patterns of participants per rating task.

Conclusions

Audiences engage in measurable collective respiratory coordination with live performance and recorded music through simultaneous inspirations and expirations. However, these behaviours are performed by only a subset of participants at a time. This inter-participant difference is consistent with the results from repeated response experiments, in which only some participants have shown respiratory coordination with their own previous listenings. The fact that different phases of respiration showed coordination underlines the possibility that multiple mechanisms like embodied listening, attention, and hearing facilitation may be encouraging adjustments in audience members’ respiratory sequences for alignment.

References

Sato, T. G., Ohsuga, M., and Moriya, T. (2012). Increase in the timing coincidence of a respiration event induced by listening repeatedly to the same music track. Acoustical Science and Technology, 33(4):255–261

Materials

The slides are also available for download.